and I want to walk around with you

It’s taken me two days to recuperate from my excitement-filled 18-hour day out on Tuesday: I’d spent the day lounging in the sun at the beach, followed by one of the best gigs of this year –Animal Collective playing at the Powerstation (scroll down for gig details).

My Tuesday kicked off bright and early with a wake-up txt message from my friend making sure that I had indeed gotten out of bed by 7.40am – which I personally thought was a little over-the-top, but considering for the entire year I’d rolled out of bed at 7.55am for school on the days which I didn’t have training nor rehearsal… it seemed understandable that they wanted to make sure the driver was awake.

Nine of us decided to head up north to the Shakespear Regional Park, and set up site for the day on Te Haruhi Bay. Ironically the best part about the whole trip for me (asides from how early they’d made the departure time) was the drive up north. Good friends, decent music, great views through the sunnies and an effortless swift drive for just over an hour was definitely my cup of tea. The biggest obstacle of the day was when the people in my car disagreed with those in the other car as to where we wanted to set our towels down for the day. I’d personally vouched for the sand and didn’t understand why we’d drive all the way to a nice beach with decent, soft sand (Auckland is full of overly shelly beaches that don’t really have decent sand) only to spend the day sitting on the grass; but eventually we compromised, moved around a bit and got the best of both worlds when we threw a frisbee around on the sand and I even attempted to use a soft bat on a foam ball. It either went too far or in whacky directions or both – the foam ball didn’t stand a chance against the wind!

At some point in the afternoon after several hours of swimming, lying in the sun with music and pigging out on buns and a roast chicken that we’d bought from Countdown, we decided that we’d bury Euan in the sand. Well, actually he’d volunteered himself, and made sure that we made the sand wet and compact enough that he couldn’t escape. And soon, what do you know, one of the boys suggested (how typical) to make the buried-Euan into a giant penis. I felt somewhat guilty for having encouraged the use of dried seaweeds as pubs around his head, followed by Michael’s cam-whoring antics as the owner of the giant penis once he saw me whip my camera out!

The real fun began when I got to surpass having my bag checked at the door of the Powerstation simply because I was being given a media photography pass and got to dart through the door. My obligatory drink of a Monteith’s Original led to my vow of never ever drinking beer out of a plastic cup again, regardless of how good and cold the beer was. It just tasted vile… with a slight tinge of that smell of plastic which mixes in with your taste buds at the back of your throat. Nasty. $8 for plastic beer? No thank you. The bartender looked at me with great distaste when I asked if he could just give me the bottle – I imagined in my head that he was thinking something along the lines of “Didn’t you get the memo? No glass bottles in this venue!”, good lord. Not surprisingly the rest of the evening only went uphill from there – Bachelorette’s set (or what I caught of it) was enjoyable albeit the couple of technical difficulties which caused her to even restart a song. Boy was I wrong when I’d expected to see a duo on stage – obviously my friend had misled my beliefs to this “opening band” idea, and apparently I’d also missed her best song. Nonetheless, thanks to the mellow tone of Bachelorette and the use of my camera, I easily settled myself in a comfortable, just off-centre spot in the front row. I’m pretty sure I was allowed, if not supposed to be in the pit in front of the railing, but I simply didn’t want to have to leave the front after 3 songs – which turned out to be a priceless decision.

In a strange way, I’m grateful for the photography for 3-songs-only rule, as it meant I was forced to set my camera aside and fully throw myself into enjoying the show. Otherwise, I know I would’ve been far too torn between thrashing around during the set or staying affixed behind my camera. I applaud them for their set list, especially with slotting in tracks from their latest album evenly throughout the set – opening with In the Flowers, ending the encore with My Girls, with an extended “just a sec more in my… beeeeeed” from Panda Bear nicely placed in the middle. Pure magic. For quite a few of my shots I’d purposely used a slower shutter speed and aperture to capture the atmosphere and buzzy movement of it all.

Here’s my favourite, followed by some highlights (click here for full set):




Tell me where it hurts, amnesia

I’m just going to add this at the top of this post, since I’m lazy: but how the heck did i forget to mention that i got accepted into jazz school?!! I’m so excited, this means I don’t have to fall back on doing law (it sounds a bit backwards, I know), but it’s what I wanted.

I usually take a lot of joy in photographing gigs, especially the really challenging ones in some stupidly dark venue, with rugged band boys that like to move around far too much – but last night was a totally different story. For some reason, despite being a Saturday night, I just wanted to curl up at home and stay that way. It didn’t help that I’d developed a headache, then shown up only to discovered that the “doors open” time had been postponed by an hour (thankfully I always show up very late anyway), but it still pissed me off. To add to this, as I was getting stamped off the doorlist, the promoter/organiser of the gig tells me that no flash photography is allowed. This is usually music to my ears (no pun intended), as it means no one else should be annoyingly flashing also, except that the only other time I had been to the venue, the band had been lit from the back of the stage – silhouettes get old. Quickly.

Lo’ and behold, my worst fears had been confirmed – the stage was indeed lit from behind, and very dimly so, might I add. This wasn’t helped by the fact that I simply thought the first band was rubbish… and faaar too loud. I’d forgotten my earplugs. And in my attempt to photograph with as much light source as possible, I had to be stuck right next to the stack of speakers. Great. I think the only highlight of my night was the fact that the 2nd supporting band had greatly improved since the last time I saw them at their EP release a few months ago, and I actually thoroughly enjoyed their set last night, despite the literal headache plus the one of trying to find some damn light!

Sometimes, I feel like all my photos could end up in one big blur of the same thing. I don’t want to become one of those perfect photographers that has perfect lighting in each shot, with the musicians all in their standard stances and poses of playing their instruments… I try to capture some essence of the moment – something that is only there for that flicker of a second and will never happen again. Even throughout my daily excursions I have this really bad habit with looking at everything twice, or for too long; it’s because I think I will never see it again, which is true depending on if you look at it in the (somewhat) pessimistic way that I do. So i hope these aren’t boring.

Here are some of the pics from last night, the rest are all here:
My favourite is actually the first picture, a reflection of the sky tower that i saw in a puddle whilst waiting for doors to open.

P.S. Thanks for all the comments letting me know about problems regarding my comment form, the gravatar appearance, etc… i should get around to fixing it soon, hopefully along with a new theme.

When our palms meet it feels like symmetry

On Thursday night I went to the prettiest album release concert ever – Teacups , a friends band, released their first album, Forest Fiction . They’d chosen the Hopetoun Alpha as their venue, and decorated the place with fairy lights and Christmas trees. I’ve inserted some below, but for the full set of photos, go here .

I’d drafted up this post like 10 hours ago and completely forgotten about it until now (3am)… between then and now I’ve been at a friend’s sister’s 21st, where 3 of us (piano, drums and me on bass) were hired to play jazz for a couple of hours as it was a garden party. Although, it was all a bit fail for about half an hour because it started raining on us and we had to rearrange everything to get us some shelter! For some reason I found the set way more relaxing and easier than the one I did on Wednesday, at a dinner event where we had piano, trumpet and bass – we couldn’t have drums because it was a tiny venue and it would’ve been too loud – but Liz (coincidentally, from Teacups) couldn’t play trumpet for us tonight since she had a gig in town already. I’m not sure, but I think the fact that I got to sit on the amp instead of having to stand with my 5kg bass weighing down on my left shoulder helped a great deal; as well has having drums do half my job for me, meaning much less brain activity required, haha.

This is worse than winter

The weather around the general Pacific area has been shocking – I’m sure I don’t need to delve into all the lows, earthquakes, tsunamis and whatnots… so “summer hockey” last night (and undoubtedly tomorrow night also) was atrociously freezing and wet.

I haven’t been studying much these holidays, but last Friday night my friend’s band, the Artisan Guns finally released their first EP through EMI, Bird & Bone. It’s amazing. I was so excited to have bought it in a store as well, and I’m sure the novelty is far greater for them than it is for me. Sadly, my favourite track (Tuesday Night) isn’t on their myspace page… but their EP Release gig blew the audience away. Unfortunately I haven’t had time to put pics of them up yet, but I’m finally uploaded photos of other friends of mine, who were their supporting act, the Glass Owls. Photos can be found here, or through Gallery -> Summer Boys.

I don’t usually get very good shots of drummers, cos they tend to be right at the back of very dark stages, but the photos from Friday were my best yet, even if I say so myself. I’ve just gotten back from Metronomy’s concert, and it’s 2.33am, so blogging is probably the last thing I ought to be doing right now… but I just felt like putting some photos up. Right now, my jacket is still grossly damp from me having been stuck in it in the front row, dancing and clicking away. Urgh.

Frozen sweets and pains

Anyone unfortunate enough to have been within my vicinity for the past week will have undoubtedly heard of the endless pain on the right side of my mouth caused by two wisdom teeth growing simultaneously.

I’m sure majority thought I was just being a hypochondriac with all my bitching about it – but no longer! I finally managed to get a dentist’s appointment for about an hour ago, and immediately the dentist said I had to have the top one pulled out – right then and there. Needless to say I was mortified – I hadn’t had a tooth pulled out in over a decade and the last time I was sitting in the same seat a couple of months ago I’d had some fillings put in. My memory immediately flicked back to the pain and discomfort… if fillings hurt so much, how bad is getting a tooth pulled out going to be?! It turns out that getting numbing injections took a lot longer and hurt a lot more than getting the tooth itself taken out. I asked to keep it – but they didn’t even rinse it for me! At the moment, I’m just afraid of the numbness wearing off, since I could see some fleshy bits attached to the tooth, urgh. Sorry if the photo’s a bit gruesome, couldn’t help it!

The upside of it all is that Mum and I drove straight to the ice cream factory store and bought 4x frozen yoghurts and 2x mango sorbet tubs all for the cheap price of $10! The looney downside is that I can’t have hot food for a week; have to keep biting on this fucking gauze that’s really pissing me off right now to stop the bleeding; have to keep taking antibiotics; aaaaaand… I can’t drink my pains away either, bugger! Mind you, that’s proably better for my health and eftpos card in the long-run, but I’m going to see Handsome Furs tonight and was hoping to have a beer or too, grrr.

On the strand of music, I photographed the Popstrangers gig on Saturday night, so eveeentuuually the pics will be up. Also, the Stage Band has a gig at the Howick Club tonight; I’m not sure what the occasion is but I guess I’ll find out in about an hour. And the best news? Concert Band won KBB!

1 … 10 11 12 13 14 15